Rakuten Mobile has announced plans to automatically cancel contracts — and let the associated phone numbers lapse — for subscribers who haven’t linked their account to a Rakuten ID, effective end of November 2026. After ITmedia’s report was picked up on 5ch’s Business News+ board, posters voiced anxiety about losing numbers they’d used for years and questioned why linking a Rakuten ID should be mandatory at all. Some pointed to concrete reasons accounts go unlinked — shareholders giving away perk SIMs, or lines left dormant just to pad contract quotas — and opinions split over whether the real goal is cracking down on fraudulent contracts or simply corralling users into Rakuten’s membership ecosystem.
Won't this seriously cut into their subscriber count?
4AnonymousSep 3, 2026 10:15
What's even the point of this?
5AnonymousSep 3, 2026 10:17
Japan Communications (a smaller MVNO) makes way more sense. Time to port my number out (MNP).
6AnonymousSep 3, 2026 10:34
Another heavy-handed move… they might end up getting sued over this.
7AnonymousSep 3, 2026 10:42
First it's 'free up to 1GB' and deals like that — they scramble to grab customers any way they can, then just dump them.
8AnonymousSep 3, 2026 10:42
Between this and Yahoo, it's nothing but weird companies these days.
9AnonymousSep 3, 2026 10:46
What happens to a phone number you've used for decades once it gets cancelled?
10AnonymousSep 3, 2026 11:06
I'd like to know if there's actually a legitimate reason not to link your Rakuten ID.
12AnonymousSep 3, 2026 11:19
Re: #10
Aren't there people who don't even have a Rakuten ID in the first place?
24AnonymousSep 3, 2026 12:08
Re: #10
Some shareholders get a bunch of SIMs sent to them as a shareholder perk and just give them away to other people.
35AnonymousSep 3, 2026 13:05
Re: #10
There are probably a lot of lines that were signed up just to hit a sales quota and never actually used.
11AnonymousSep 3, 2026 11:17
There's probably someone out there who thinks 'if you get scammed, that's on you.'
13AnonymousSep 3, 2026 11:20
Isn't the Rakuten ID just the thing you use to log into Rakuten Ichiba (Rakuten's online mall)?
14AnonymousSep 3, 2026 11:23
Maybe this is aimed at 'contract beggars' (people who sign up just to grab freebies/promos and never actually use the line). Keep it up!
15AnonymousSep 3, 2026 11:38
What about people with shareholder SIMs? I already use my Rakuten ID for my main Rakuten line.
16AnonymousSep 3, 2026 11:38
This is exactly the kind of thing that'll make the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications furious.
17AnonymousSep 3, 2026 11:42
If you don't like it, can't you just cancel it yourself?
29AnonymousSep 3, 2026 12:20
Re: #17
It's a forced cancellation either way, so this actually saves you the hassle of cancelling it yourself.
22AnonymousSep 3, 2026 11:59
Canceling the contract outright is going too far.
25AnonymousSep 3, 2026 12:12
What do you mean 'web version'? Just tell us how to check it from the phone itself.
26AnonymousSep 3, 2026 12:14
Can you even use Rakuten Link without a Rakuten ID?
27AnonymousSep 3, 2026 12:17
So what's the actual reason behind this?
28AnonymousSep 3, 2026 12:18
What even is a Rakuten ID in the first place? Do the shareholder-perk SIMs even come with one?
30AnonymousSep 3, 2026 12:32
Probably because the numbers were being used for crime — there must be a ton of fraudulent contracts out there.
31AnonymousSep 3, 2026 12:42
Maybe they should just stop doing those '1 yen to switch carriers' (MNP) promotions?
32AnonymousSep 3, 2026 12:54
If family-plan users scramble to link accounts and their kids go on an unauthorized spending spree, that's a jackpot for them — the big three carriers already got rich off gacha-game family bankruptcies.
33AnonymousSep 3, 2026 12:59
Doing stuff like this is just going to push people to other carriers. It'll backfire.
34AnonymousSep 3, 2026 13:03
They could've just auto-generated IDs from phone numbers and forced everyone onto one. Doing it this way is just going to make people cut ties with them instead. Not very smart.
36AnonymousSep 3, 2026 13:30
If this is coming from a Ministry directive, maybe the plan is to shrink them down and confiscate/reclaim their spectrum allocation.
37AnonymousSep 3, 2026 13:33
Re: #10
If you don't log in and agree to link it, you get cancelled — doesn't matter whether you actually use the line or not.
38AnonymousSep 3, 2026 13:34
It's all in how you phrase it. They could just say: 'We only issue e-invoices now, so an email address is required — please complete first-time login on our verification site.' (Which just means: sign up for a Rakuten membership.)
39AnonymousSep 3, 2026 13:37
If they actually want people to link their accounts, they should be handing out a ton of reward points for it.
40AnonymousSep 3, 2026 13:38
A SoftBank exec once asked 'where do all these net new subscribers even come from?' — referring to exactly this kind of trick. Are they going to be okay once that whole batch of net adds disappears?
41AnonymousSep 3, 2026 13:40
I bet people who were using Rakuten just as a backup/secondary number will move over to Povo (au's low-cost sub-brand).
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Rakuten Mobile has long encouraged linking accounts to a Rakuten ID, but this latest move goes further — automatically cancelling the contracts of anyone who hasn’t linked. Behind this is a history of boosting subscriber numbers through shareholder perks and steep MNP discount campaigns, which appears to have left a certain number of lines that are essentially unused. There’s also a broader trend of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications pushing carriers to tighten identity verification as a countermeasure against illegal SIM sales and scam-related fraud, so making ID linkage mandatory may be part of that effort. In the thread, reactions were split between concern that this could push more users toward switching carriers, and the view that it’s a reasonable anti-fraud measure. For users who’ve kept the same number for years, the article alone doesn’t make clear whether this kind of cancellation condition was disclosed at the time they signed up, and it’s also unclear just how many people will actually be affected.
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